Elite Traveler July-August 2016

INSPIRE THE BIG INTERVIEW

“I tookmydriving seriously, so I have enjoyedMonaco more aftermy career”

hosting Rolex customers, Sir Jackie is back at his hotel doing interviews. He tells me he doesn’t have long before his next appointment. His schedule would be daunting for anyone. For a 77-year-old, it’s incredible. We talk about the differences in F1 now and when he raced. It was, he says, a more innocent time, a time when “men were men”. It was also a more glamorous time and nowhere captured that better than Monte Carlo. Sir Jackie admits it was the arrival of Grace Kelly that transformed things. “The Monaco Grand Prix has been running since 1929, but it came alive big time when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier. Suddenly you’d get people like Cary Grant at the Grand Prix. I brought Elizabeth Taylor and Sean Connery here. I met The Beatles here and I became close friends with George Harrison, who was keen on racing. Over the years anybody who likes motor sport has been here. They love the color and the glamour.” Despite enjoying three wins at Monaco, he says his best times in the principality have come since retiring from racing. “I took my driving seriously, so I have enjoyed Monaco more after my career.” Driving was also more physically demanding than many realize. “There was a huge amount of travel involved,” says Sir Jackie. “One year I crossed the Atlantic 86 times. That’s over 43 trips to America and back.” It’s no surprise he got very ill that year. “I was shattered. In the Roman Polanski film in 1971, there’s a shot where I am signing autographs and I’m totally gaga, it wasn’t even race day, it was just qualifying. I went on to win the race, but I was so tired. The following year I had a duodenal ulcer that hemorrhaged. Those were tougher times. That doesn’t happen today. For one thing, travel is certainly easier.” The driving took its toll, with Sir Jackie frequently leaving the car at the end of a race with blistered, bleeding palms. When you consider that Monaco involved 1,860 manual gear changes, that’s no surprise. And of course, the price of a mistake then was much higher. In Weekend of a Champion , Sir Jackie, referring to a spectacular crash he’d had in front of

FRIDAY It’s the Friday evening of the Grand Prix weekend in Monte Carlo. The town is in party mood, the streets are busy, the harbor packed and the hotels full. A permanent Eurodisco beat booms across the harbor, which is full of impressively large yachts. Meanwhile, at the Monaco Yacht Club (itself designed by Lord Norman Foster to look like a huge yacht) things are a little more sedate. There’s the inevitable DJ on the terrace, but as a select group gathers to celebrate an anniversary, the atmosphere is polite and polished. The party is celebrating 50 years since Sir Jackie won the Monaco Grand Prix for the first time. At the party, alongside the BRMhe drove that year – a beautifully simple car, which must have taken plenty of driving – are the winners of every 10th year since 1966. That means legends such as Niki Lauda (1976) and Alain Prost (1986) along with Olivier Panis (1996) and Fernando Alonso (2006). Not many, if any, would be as easily recognized beyond the world of motor racing as Sir Jackie. The party is organized by Rolex, a global partner in F1 since 2013. The brand is proud of its motor sport credentials, which stretch back to the 1930s and support for land speed record breaker Sir MalcolmCampbell. Sir Jackie is presented with a newwatch in honor of his 1966 win (and to celebrate 48 years as a Rolex Testimonee). It again says plenty that he appears delighted by this latest addition to a watch collection

started in the 1960s when, having won $25,000 for qualifying for a race in the US, he went straight to a watch shop. As he tells me later: “It was always my ambition to own a Rolex. I couldn’t afford it as a young garage mechanic. So when I had that $25,000 for qualifying I thought ‘this is something special,’ and I bought myself a Rolex.” I ask whether his first Monaco win was the moment he knew he was going to succeed at motor racing. “No,” he says bluntly. “I never felt I was succeeding. It comes from having dyslexia. I always felt there was someone better, cleverer and smarter. I never thought I was good at anything.” Pushed to explain the impact of dyslexia, he says that while debilitating, it was instrumental in his success. “I was driven to succeed because of dyslexia. Look at the successful people with dyslexia. It’s because it forces you to adopt coping strategies and newways of problem solving. It allows you to think quickly and react. You find your own solutions. The people who go to Harvard on a six-day course come out thinking the same. We have to do things differently. We have to go our own way.” SATURDAY It’s the afternoon after the night before and there’s not quite 24 hours until the race. Having spent the afternoon pressing palms, being photographed and